Why be moral ?

The appeal to think and act in a moral way often comes up in discussion and debate, but how does an individual decide what is morally responsible? To help unravel this question, two well regarded philosophers, James Franklin and Alan Saunders, ponder various propositions.

Transcript

Paul Comrie-Thomson: A question that's getting a lot of air lately is; do we have to take responsibility for the potential environmental refugees? The hypothetical presented goes like this; as the climate warms, certain lands go underwater and thousands seek to take refuge in Australia. At Counterpoint this has got us thinking. Who decides what is responsible? Or, to put it formally, how can an individual decide what is morally responsible?

In terms of, say, sexual morality, the current orthodoxy seems to be 'I will not let any of those troublesome clergy tell me what to do', 'get your rosaries off my ovaries' and all of that. But if clergymen or the secular concerned say we have a moral responsibility to, say, save the planet or we have a moral responsibility to accept environmental refugees, there's a general assent given to this proposition. We seem to say, 'well, that's a good thing', and in the same area of discussion we have statements like 'we must stop exporting coal because we have a moral responsibility to protect our children's future'.

The word 'moral' is being thrown around a lot, but there's a problem; who says what's moral? Who speaks with authority here? And more fundamentally, why be moral anyway? What if I don't care about children or the future? And of course should God or the Judeo Christian tradition still get a look-in when we talk about, say, environmental refugees or saving the planet?

It's a dilemma, but here to help us with our dilemma are Alan Saunders, well known to RN listeners for his program The Philosopher's Zone, and James Franklin. James is an associate professor in the department of mathematics at the University of NSW who has a well deserved reputation as a philosopher. His most recent book is Catholic Values and Australian Realities published by Connor Court.

James Franklin, if I could start with you, how do we get going a discussion of morality? Do we say something like, well, we should aim for the greatest benefit of the greatest number of people? That is, we're moral because it aids social cohesion. Or is it about a sense of good and evil and the worth of peoples? How do we start talking about morality?

James Franklin: When we see the decomposed bodies of victims of genocide dug up, we understand that those were people like us and something terrible happened to them. We understand why it would be bad if it happened to us and because they're people like us it would be just as bad if it happened to them. It's about the worth of the persons that we understand, starting with ourselves and generalising to other people. So to take the dilemma you talked about, about the environmental refugees, of course refugees...the Tuvaluans who were swimming around in the ocean if their atoll has gone under, they have rights because they are people like us. If there is a dilemma, if there is a conflict between their rights and, say, our children's rights, the reason there is a dilemma is just because all of those people have worth.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Alan Saunders, if I could bring you in here, do you have a similar attitude, that morality is more about the worth of persons rather than social rules to aid social cohesion?

Alan Saunders: Yes, I agree entirely with Jim about how we see people who are like us and we respond immediately to the fact that they have a claim on our attention. I think, however (and this goes to the heart of your question), we should realise that there are such things as moral fashions and there have been times in history when people would have said, well, they might be people like us, they might be Catholics, they might be Protestants, they might be heretics of some kind or other, but that means that they are not really like us and therefore that they are not worthy of the sort of moral consideration that we give to others.

I think what goes to the heart of your question is that there are moral fashions, that you say that now it's fashionable to be concerned about environmental refugees as opposed to being concerned about questions of sexual morality. Well, in the past it was fashionable to be concerned about how many persons there were...about the relationship between the persons in the trinity, that was the really happening issue. These things do change, and although my personal morality is a lot to do with seeing other people's personhood and being concerned about that, I am aware that this is not a universal opinion.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Okay, you both seems to have some agreement about moral judgements concerning people, what about moral questions that don't involve people? Should we take back spent uranium, seeing as we've exported it? Does worth of persons come into this at all or is this a different sort of question? Jim Franklin, should we export uranium, should we take back spent uranium? Is there a moral dilemma to that question or is this purely technical?

James Franklin: No, there is a moral question to it because we need to respect the rights of perhaps future generations who may have to clean up our mess. We are certainly cleaning up some messes of previous generations who didn't look after the environment and threw rubbish into it. But the reason...it's not a special question, it's just a calculation that follows from the fact that somebody is going to have to clean up our mess.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: So it's just an extension of your general principle that morality is about recognising the worth of persons and trying to avoid the situations, in the present or the future, that might harm persons.

James Franklin: Exactly, it's a very simple principle but in the real world it has very complicated consequences.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: If the worth of persons, for both you and Alan Saunders, seems to be...at the moment it's either the fashion or it's the guiding principle, how do we get into the problem of moral dilemmas? I'll give you an example; Tim Flannery has asserted that the maximum number of people the Australian land mass can sustain at the moment is fewer than 10 million. So if we've got a moral responsibility, say, with cleaning up uranium to care for our children or care for future generations, then is it not the case that environmental refugees in the future will have to be excluded because you can't care for both?

And underlying this is a more fundamental problem; if it's just an opinion about the worth of persons, how do you resolve this? We've got to care for our children, we've got to care for environmental refugees...if the Tim Flannery scenario is correct, we can't do both, how do you resolve this? Alan Saunders, I might ask you; the moral dilemma, how do you resolve it?

Alan Saunders: I think we can easily think of a case that's more urgent and easier to address than the Tim Flannery one; the Titanic is going down, you're in a lifeboat and there are a lot of people clustering around trying to get into the lifeboat, and it's fairly easy to say that if we let them all into the lifeboat, we all die. So there's clearly no desirable outcome of letting everybody into the lifeboat, and that's very, very hard and it's going to be a decision...if you decide, sorry, we're not letting you in, it's going to be a very difficult decision to live with for the rest of your life, but, you know, nobody said these things were easy. So the question that we have to ask about the Tim Flannery situation is whether it is really, really like that. Is it that sort of urgent dilemma? I suspect it isn't.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: James Franklin, I might just bring you in on the Titanic rather than Australia's future. Ten people are in the lifeboat, it can only take ten, there's another ten people, is it moral to say no you can't come in? It's hard but is it a morally valid choice?

James Franklin: In the end there may be choices that are very hard that have to be made. Indeed there are in cases of war where it may be necessary to do something where there may be collateral damage. But the normal case of a dilemma of the kind we did solve with, for example, the Vietnamese boatpeople refugees...we just did our best, we admitted almost 200,000 of them and it's worked out quite well for both them and our children.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: That was a case where it was what we call a win-win situation. I'm wondering where God fits into all of this. Dostoyevsky said if God is dead then everything is permitted, if God goes then all we have is moral relativism. Can we have moral absolutes without prescribing to what Professor Dawkins calls the God delusion? Jim Franklin, I might ask you first; do we need God to have a sense of moral absolutes?

James Franklin: Yes and no. In a sense we don't because the worth of persons is there irrespective of the existence of God. In fact that's what Jesus says in the parable of the Good Samaritan, he says that people following religious rules just pass by but the Samaritan who had, by Jewish standards, incorrect religious views had compassion on the victim beside the road, just recognised that as a person who needed help. So in a direct sense we don't need God for morals. On the other hand, if we believe in a completely atheistic and materialist universe, like Dawkins' does, that tends to undercut our view of the absoluteness of ethical requirements because it says that really humans are not the kind of things that could have absolute worth, they're just like heaps of rocks.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Alan Saunders, in a materialist, atheist universe, is it difficult to say that humans have more worth than other material creatures?

Alan Saunders: I'm not sure to what extent it is more difficult because you just look into their eyes and you see a creature like you. I've been watching a very entertaining show called Gordon Ramsay's F-Word on the food channel on cable, and Gordon Ramsay is raising some pigs and he's trying to persuade his kids that these pigs...they're not pets, we're going to eat them, okay? And the kids don't quite get the point, but somebody else has pointed out that actually Gordon Ramsay doesn't get the point either because he's really becoming very attached to these pigs, and pigs are very cute and very intelligent animals. So there are obviously borderline cases. I could kill a sheep, I'm not sure that I could kill a pig. But I do eat pork. But there are borderline cases. But I think that I do recognise the worth of a human being more easily than, say, I recognise the worth of an oyster.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Speaking of fashions, this hasn't always been universal, cannibalism has existed. Alan Saunders, would you say of people who had been cannibals that they had a flawed understanding of the worth of persons?

Alan Saunders: I think I've actually talked to Jim about his on my show. I would say that they had a rather different view of the worth of persons. If we're really going to get into cannibalism, there's endo-cannibalism and exo-cannibalism, and endo-cannibalism means eating your own kind and you normally do that when they've died of natural causes and it's a rather sad, sacramental feast. Exo-cannibalism is when you eat the enemy, and there's every sign that the enemy often expected to be eaten and would possibly be rather offended if you didn't eat them...hey, don't give me any special treatment, I'm a captured warrior, I deserve to be eaten!

Paul Comrie-Thomson: It's a mark of respect that you eat me.

Alan Saunders: Yes.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Cannibals makes us think about desert islands, and one thing that puzzles me and I'm sure a lot of our listeners is if you are a shipwrecked mariner, you're on a desert island, you are entirely by yourself, does morality come into your life at all there? I mean, there aren't any other people around. Can a shipwrecked mariner be moral or can he be immoral, or is morality only when there are other people around? Jim Franklin?

James Franklin: Yes, it is possible to have duties to yourself, a duty to keep yourself healthy, for the same reason as...well, you're a person the same as other people are, so the reasons why you should look after them are the reasons why you should look after yourself. It makes a difference when you're thinking about, for example, teen suicide. We don't say something like, 'well, to each his own' and 'whose life is it anyway', we say that somebody...a temporarily depressed rural youth with a gun, for example, has a duty to themselves even if they think their life is not worth living. They've made a mistake.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Alan?

Alan Saunders: I entirely agree. Just to take the desert island question; yes, I think you have a duty, for example, not to despair in circumstances like that.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Is that a moral duty?

Alan Saunders: Yes, I think it's a very strong moral duty. Now, were you to fail in this duty, I think we would all understand, we would think this was forgivable, but it would be a failing that we were forgiving.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: The traditional literature talks about the seven deadly sins, mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy...the mariner on his desert island of course could be guilty of most of those, he could be guilty of lust and sloth and pride and so on, but in current discussion people don't really talk about deadly sins do they, Jim Franklin, they talk more about ethics in terms of relating to other people, they don't talk about private vices or private virtues.

James Franklin: They don't talk so much about virtues at all, which is perhaps a pity because you need habits of thinking and habits of practice otherwise you won't actually be able to get done what you need to do. The same as to add up, you need some practice at how to do it. It's a matter of not looking at each dilemma or each action on a case by case basis but having in place, much as you would for a sporting event for example, having in place skills for doing things naturally and normally.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Alan Saunders?

Alan Saunders: I think people do think about that these days. I think virtue ethics has made a big comeback over the last few years, but if we're addressing the question about what this has got to do with God, why does it matter if you're on a desert island and you're committing one of the seven deadly sins? Why does it matter? I mean, I am lustful on a desert island but there's nobody to be lustful about, so why does that matter? It matters because God is watching, it matters because the divine superego is watching over me.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: On that point we'll say thank you very much James Franklin and thank you very much Alan Sunders.

James Franklin: Thank you.

Alan Saunders: Thank you.

Michael Duffy: Alan Saunders is from Radio National's Philosopher's Zone, and Jim Franklin is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of NSW and the author of Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia.